Programmatic TV Advertising Opportunities Are Here
Digital programmatic advertising is now a full two-thirds of all digital transactions. Now that programmatic has expanded into the traditional advertising space, i.e. TV, savvy companies are looking for ways to automate their ad buying while more precise targeting and analyzing the results those ads bring.
TV has yet to feel the full effect of programmatic ad buying, but the trend will come fast. By 2018, programmatic ad buying is expected to take up around 17% of the total market share. This comes to around $10 billion.
The Time for TV Programmatic is Here Now
The reason that programmatic advertising spread so quickly was its ability to target niche audiences across an aggregate of similarly-themed but otherwise unconnected websites. If you think that television is too much of a mass-market tool to give you the same kind of demographic and geographic precision, you are wrong. Local TV gives the same focus as websites with a better geographic component, as a matter of fact. While you might be stuck trying to aggregate data from ad buys from sources across the Internet, you can easily see exactly what your money gets you from the consolidated analytics of local TV stations.
The proliferation of specialized channels across cable networks also gives a great deal of opportunity to programmatic ad buyers who are looking for niche audiences. Even these smaller niche cable stations have better built-in analytics than you will ever get online, so you will be able to improve a campaign very quickly even if you start off on the wrong foot.
Staying Local for National Goals
The benefits of actually trying to go national using TV are less impressive than one might think. Most campaigns do not need to go national at all in order to accomplish their goals, even campaigns from international companies. One such example is Bank of America – an international banking institution that chose to drill down into specific local markets to drum up business, forgoing a franchised message over national channels. Pareto’s Rule is in full effect with programmatic ad buying: Even on TV, advertisers are looking for that 20% of the audience that purchases 80% of the product, and everyone else is a bonus if they feel like tagging along. If not, oh well – no skin off the bottom line.
TV and Digital Together
As programmatic ad buying increases on television, the savviest businesses will move into the space that most marketing experts are already predicting marketing is going on within the next decade or so. Soon, there will be no difference between the ads that play on Facebook and the ads that play on TV. Companies will tell their customers to tune into a TV show to view an inbound marketing piece from a campaign that started on Periscope. Some optimistic marketers are predicting that this will happen even sooner. Either way, the idea of programmatic ad buying will soon be just as traditional as its manual counterpart is today.
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